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In 2008, a group of scientists, engineers and others predicted The Big One would lead to more than 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries and $200 billion in damage and other losses.Ī scientific forecast released in 2014 pegged the likelihood at 48% of at least one California earthquake with a magnitude of 7.5 or more within the following 30 years. That quake would be 44 times stronger than Southern California’s Northridge earthquake of 1994, which caused 72 deaths, about 9,000 injuries and an estimated $25 billion in damage.
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But when it does occur, it promises to be an epic disaster.Įxperts define The Big One as a quake of at least a 7.8 magnitude along the southern part of the San Andreas Fault. Of course, all of this research doesn’t prove The Big One is imminent. As such, millions of Californians live along a fault responsible for some of the state’s biggest earthquakes. The Los Angeles metro area borders the southern swath of the San Andreas, and the northern swath cuts through the San Francisco Bay Area. The study’s authors put the odds of a southern San Andreas quake happening by July 2021 at 1%. That’s according to a study published in July in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.ĭue to the connection between the Garlock Fault and the San Andreas Fault, the study suggests a 50-50 chance that a Garlock quake within 30 miles of the San Andreas would lead to a quake in what’s known as the Mojave segment of the San Andreas’ southern end. Little FaultsĪs Ross and his colleagues explained, major earthquakes are commonly thought to be triggered by the rupture of one long fault, like the roughly 800-mile San Andreas Fault, and not by a network of faults.īecause the Ridgecrest quakes-which shook a remote desert area of Southern California, causing little damage and no deaths-increased stress on the Garlock Fault, that fault is now about 100 times more likely to cause a large quake than before the Ridgecrest quakes. Translation: The threat of The Big One might be bigger than anyone imagined.
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When the study was released, Zachary Ross, assistant professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology and the study’s lead author, issued this warning: “We can’t just assume that the largest faults dominate the seismic hazard if many smaller faults can link up to create these major quakes.” In addition, the 6.4-magnitude and 7.1-magnitude Ridgecrest quakes and more than 100 aftershocks strained the nearby Garlock Fault. The quakes exposed a “web” of 20 previously undiscovered small earthquake faults that contributed to the Ridgecrest event. “The biggest obstacle can be yourself” when it comes to earthquake preparedness, says Jason Ballmann, communications manager at the Southern California Earthquake Center.Īccording to a study published last October by geophysicists at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the last significant earthquakes in the state were Southern California’s twin Ridgecrest quakes in July 2019. With nearly 40 million residents, California ranks as the most populated state in the country. Pomeroy notes that most Californians live within 30 miles of one of the state’s more than 500 active faults, including those that have been newly unearthed. “Because large earthquakes don’t happen very frequently, many people don’t think about them often or fully comprehend the risks,” says Glenn Pomeroy, CEO of the California Earthquake Authority (CEA), the state’s biggest provider of residential earthquake insurance. Disaster-preparedness experts worry that Californians are underprepared for a colossal quake, particularly when it comes to insurance. But new research suggests it might be sooner than we previously thought. No one can predict with certainty when the next massive earthquake- aka “The Big One”-will rock Southern California. Ridgecrest residents inspect a recent fault rupture following two large earthquakes in the area on July 7, 2019, near Ridgecrest, California.